What Will AMP Mean for AdWords Advertisers?

Last week we asked the question: will accelerated mobile pages make my website any faster? The answer was a resounding kind of, but with some annoying consequences. Either way, AMP is here to stay and you many as well get comfortable with the idea. Which leaves us asking what the impact will be for AdWords advertisers.

As things stand, AMP is being pushed as a format aimed at publishers, rather than businesses with AdWords ads pointing to landing pages. But there are a number of implications this could have on both Search and Display Network ads.

AMP live, Google working on implementation

AMP has already gone live and you’ll see the results crop up for relevant searches. As we say, AMP is aimed more at publishers, designed to make their articles load faster. This keeps most consumer intent searches and those more likely to trigger AMP results fairly separate.

Here you can see a search for the very broad, but highly covered topic of sports:

As you can see, no AdWords ads display for this search but you get a very prominent carousel of AMP results. Why is this important? Because you don’t want those glitzy AMP listings to steal the attention of commercially-minded searchers. Neither does Google, of course, so we’re hoping it gets this balance right, even if it takes some fine tuning.

The bigger question regarding AMP and AdWords is what the impact will be on display ads. Google has already announced a number of guidelines and support for ads on AMP pages (big surprise) with AdSense being among the 20 platforms already signed up.

The result will be faster pages that load ads more quickly and (presumably) lower bounce rates as a result. That all sound very promising in terms of impressions and clicks, assuming you can target the right content sites with your ads (generally more tricky on editorial sites).

Google’s strict guidelines on how ads should display on AMP will also be interesting to keep an eye on. Ads should be as unobtrusive as possible, it says, which could help remove some of the frustration users feel with ads on publication sites. How knows, ads could even perform better as a result. Here’s to hoping.

What about AMP and analytics code?

One of the major concerns with marketers about AMP is whether its strict policy on JavaScript would allow for analytics code. After all, it would suck if all that extra speed and advertising potential came without the ability to collect data from your AMP traffic. The good news is AMP comes with support for various interactions trackable on Google Analytics. Note, Google only mentions support for its own analytics tool – something to look into.

An interesting side question will be if Google pushes AMP beyond the article/blog pages to parts of websites that need more complex code. A combination of Google Analytics, remarketing codes and JavaScript validation on your signup form sounds like too much for the existing AMP party.

“I don’t want to pre-announce any AMP product enhancements,” Besbris said in answer to the question. “But we love AMP.”

It may be a typically inconclusive answer but the concept of faster landing pages on mobile is an interesting one. Lower bounce rates, more time spent on pages and hopefully higher conversions sound like a tempting proposition. Whether Google intends to take AMP this far and how this would affect Ad Rank remains to be seen though.

So, for now at least, AdWords remains fairly protected from AMP and Google won’t be in any hurry to rock the boat. The firm is clearly working hard to make sure AMP creates a more lucrative advertising model on mobile devices, without shooting itself in the foot.